Tonight at 19:21, Swedish local time, it was the time for the full Moon of March to rise up above the horizon. It was cloudy around Östersund so I decided to go south to get away from the clouds. When I arrived to the lake Locknesjoen it looked much better so I decided to stay there and go out on the ice. It was an fantastic sight to see the Moon rise up slowly behind the thin cloud streaks that remained on the horizon. I also took the opportunity to take a quick look at comet PanStarrs. Now it is quite easy to find with the naked eye.

Musik: I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor - Chris Zabriskie (http://chriszabriskie.com)

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This video shows what happened on Mars 17 when an CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) hit Earths magnetic field. Two days earlier, sunspot AR1692 had produced a M1-class solar flare that resulted in the CME that hit Earth.

This time lapse shows what happened during four hours over Östersund here in Sweden, between 19:20 and 23:35 UT.

The time lapse consists of 2464 raw images for a total data amount of 30Gb. The photo of the Sun is a hydrogen alpha mosaic I've made from 10 images that was captured on Mars 16. Total of 10 Gb data. So all in all this movie contains over 40Gb of data that I've been processing over the last 5 days.

Music: I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor - Chris Zabriskie (http://chriszabriskie.com)

A panoramic image of Östersund from late last night. I think it's a beautiful little town with the island of Frösön joined by our two bridges. Imagine all the little people down there in the houses. What are they doing? What are they thinking? A swarm of life in a small town on a small planet in a gigantic universe.

Signing off for the night. This was one of the most amazing auroras I've seen. It seems to have been visible over almost entire Sweden. Here are a few pictures. I have four full memory cards to go through in the coming days, but now it's time for sleep.

I did a test to see if it was possible to measure the spreading of the tail of the comet PanStarrs for yesterday. Here are some rounded arc minutes I got. As you can see, it is difficult to determine exactly where the tail ends. As a comparison, a full moon, has the size of 32 arcminutes, so yesterday the tails spreading was about as big as a half full moon.

Finally a night with some clear weather. There have been some frustrating cloudy days of waiting to see the comet. There was some thin clouds in the air and we had a little trouble finding the comet at first, but it later turned out to be because it was behind a thin cloud. The comet was a beautiful sight in my little telescope with a very distinct tail. These two shots was taken 20 minutes apart. The little dot next to the comet is the star 51 Piscium (HIP 2548) located 264 light years from us. Let's hope the nights ahead will be clear so we can follow the comet's progress. In the coming weeks it continues to be low in the west after sunset.

My first solar photo this year taken in difficult conditions and with the sun only 20 degrees above the horizon. For solar photography it is better if the sun is high in the sky and not as low as it is now in the winter. I had some hard time getting this image since the clouds constantly passed by and I had to capture my sequences in the gaps that occurred.

The last picture shows a new group of sunspots that has just arrived. Unfortunately, none of these newcomers seems to be very active, so they'll probably won't produce any aurora. The long bright shapes around the sunspots are called filaments, it's huge gas and plasma clouds ejected from the solar surface. Some of these can also be seen on the sun's edge, then they are called prominences. In the picture you can also see how small the Earth is compared to the sun, however, is not the correct distance, the earth is much further away from the sun.

Also note that this is my version of the sun's color. In fact, the sun is completely white.

Now I'm looking forward to the motor focus I ordered for my solar telescope, it should arrive within a few weeks. It will give me a little better sharpness in the images. Later on this year I will also upgrade my camera to a more sensitive one. In other words, it may be a nice summer with an active solar to follow.